When your brand goofs up

There is this restaurant close to my place. It makes Kerala cuisine well — appam, puttu, idiyappam, kadala curry, mutta roast, parotta, stew, etc. We've bought breakfast from here about 3-4 times.

Then one night, we decided to try their North Indian fare — rotis, subzis, that sort of thing. We were sceptical; it is the rare restaurant that gets two cuisines right at the same time. If a restaurant is known for a particular cuisine, chances are that any other kind of food it makes will have the ‘hangover’ of that cuisine (think dal with curry leaves and mustard seeds in it). But still, there could be exceptions, right? We were new to the neighbourhood, so we didn’t know any restaurant that served good North Indian food. So we sent up a prayer and ordered rotis and subzis from this joint one night.

Disaster.

We would have tolerated it somehow if the food had been too spicy or oily, or if the cook hadn’t got the recipes right. After all, this does happen in restaurants. But what we got was stale food. The paneer was rancid, the potatoes rotten and the gravy of the curries (incidentally, both the curries we had ordered seemed to have the same gravy) …well, just weird. We didn’t get past 2 or 3 bites; we had to bin the entire thing and cook dinner (the thing we had tried to avoid in the first place).

When I called up the manager of the restaurant, he stoutly rejected whatever I said. No, the curries were made-to-order, the ingredients were all fresh, and so on. I told him I was calling him from the dining table, with the rotten food lying in front of me, virtually untouched. But it was water off a duck’s back. Adding insult to injury, he kept cutting me off, and at other times, going off the conversation for a couple of minutes to shout instructions to his staff members and even talk to other customers!

After trying for about 10 minutes to make him understand, I gave up. I didn’t want to add a bleeding head to my problems; I understood that I was banging my head against a wall.

What I got from the brand:

1.??????Outright rejection of my complaint.

2.??????A dismissive tone and manner.

3.??????No offer to even investigate the matter, let alone make restitution.

What I should have got from the brand:

1.??????An empathetic ear and an open heart as I vented my ire.

2.??????A simple apology. ‘Sorry’ would have done the trick.

3.??????A promise to look into the matter — speak to the people concerned, check the food storage and cooking processes, etc.

4.??????Restitution. The question, ‘How can we make this up to you?’ would have been music to my ears. The actual act of restitution could have taken one of a few forms: a refund of the amount I had paid; placing the money in my ‘account’, so I could use it for another meal at the restaurant, another time; better, fresh food sent in 30 minutes to replace the stale food.

5.??????A commitment to not let such a mistake happen again.

This experience made me examine how I myself handled complaints from a client. This could happen to any of us, anytime. One of the key traits of a strong brand is responsibility towards its customers: to just do well what it commits. And when the brand goofs up, it is best to simply own up the mistake, apologise and follow the other steps I have outlined above. Customers understand that brands, like people (and because they are run by people), trip up from time to time. All they want is for their complaints to be heard & acknowledged and for the brands to make amends. For a brand, the customer may be just one in a thousand. But it must understand that, for the customer, the brand was 100% of their money, desire, hope and expectation at that point in time.

This is what customer-centricity is all about. Brand custodians must realise that this is not just a feel-good principle or tactic; customer-centricity is a make-or-break factor for the business. And, realising that this cannot be in the hands of the leadership alone, they train their team members, put certain systems in place and make it part of their brand's culture.

If the restaurant had taken the right approach with me, it would have won me over for life. Apart from pocketing my repeat business, it would have gained 10 other customers from my network; I would have recommended it to my friends and acquaintances. And some of them could have brought in more customers from their respective networks and so on… the ripples would have kept spreading. The cumulative lifetime value of all these customers would have been considerable! But, as it happened, it has lost not just my business but also that of the 20 people I have already asked to keep away from it. And I’m not done yet.

What would you do when the brand you handle goofs up? If you are a person brand, what would you do when you goof up? What would be your priorities? Have you faced such a situation?

On that note, see you again soon!

Cheerio!

Ganesh

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